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Friday, May 08, 2009

In a bid to show how Blue Dogs are not as consistently prone to vote more conservative than they could likely get away with given their district's Democratic leanings--as the liberal blogosphere leads people to believe--Chris Kromm concedes that Middle Tennessee's own Blue Dog Jim Cooper is "under-performing" relative to this district's Democratic leanings:

Even on its own terms, is the idea that Blue Dogs come from uniquely conservative "hard districts" even true?

In a widely-circulated post, blogger Crisitunity ranked members of the 110th Congress by their votes compared to their districts' Partisan Voting Index, a measure first developed by political analyst Charlie Cook in 1997. The idea is to find out if a Representative's voting record in 2008 was more or less "Democratic" than his district.

"Under-performing" Democrats are those that consistently vote more conservative than they could likely get away with given their district's Democratic leanings. "Over-performing" Democrats are those that somehow manage to vote more Democratic-friendly than their constituency.

So how do the Blue Dogs stack up? According to the Swing State Project's analysis:

* Only three of the top 20 "under-performing" Democrats in 2008 were in the Blue Dog Coalition: Reps. Scott (GA-13), Harman (CA-36) and Cooper (TN-5).

* By contrast, six of the Blue Dogs were among the 20 most "over-performing"Democrats: Reps. Taylor (MS-4), Matheson (UT-2), Pomeroy (ND-AL), Lampson (TX-22), Herseth (SD-AL) and Chandler (KY-6).

An analysis of Cook's own PVI rankings for Congressional districts shuffles some of the names but arrives at the same conclusion: there are more Blue Dogs topping the list of Democratic "over-performers" than "under-performers."